All references cited in this article are part of the public record. The assertions and conclusions presented, unless otherwise noted, have not been legally contested.
Wabanakwut Kinew — Wab, to most of Canada — became the 25th Premier of Manitoba on October 18, 2023, and in doing so became the first First Nations person elected premier of a Canadian province. He has since maintained the highest approval rating of any premier in the country.1 His government has delivered a fuel tax relief, expanded pharmacare, addressed public safety, and created a new Crown corporation dedicated to Indigenous economic development. He gave a speech at the federal NDP convention in Winnipeg in March 2026 that drew eight standing ovations.2
None of this was inevitable. None of it was easy. And none of it happened because Canada cleared the path for him.
Where He Came From
Kinew was born in Kenora, Ontario, of the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. His father, Tobasonakwut Kinew, was a residential school survivor — a man who carried the weight of what that system did to him and carried it, as so many survivors did, into the lives of the people around him. Tobasonakwut became a regional chief, a university professor, a man of genuine stature, but the damage was real and it passed, as damage does, into the next generation.
Wab Kinew's early adulthood was not a politician's biography. He fell into the self-destructive pattern his father had struggled with — violence, alcoholism, a conviction for assaulting a taxi driver,3 years of misogynistic language in his music career that he has since acknowledged and renounced. He was, by his own account in his memoir The Reason You Walk, heading somewhere that would not have produced a premier.
What turned him around was fatherhood, Anishinaabe elders who saw something in him and said so, and the slow, difficult process of reconciling with his own father before Tobasonakwut died of cancer in 2012. That reconciliation — between a son and a damaged father, between a man and his heritage, between a family and the country that had tried to break it — is the core of the memoir that became a Globe and Mail bestseller and a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize.4 Kinew did not arrive in politics despite his past. He arrived because of what he did with it.
That arc matters. It is not a redemption story for the comfort of non-Indigenous readers. It is a demonstration of what resilience looks like when it is forced upon a people — when survival itself becomes the prerequisite for leadership because the alternative was designed to leave nothing standing.
What Canada Built — And What It Cost
To understand what Kinew's premiership represents, you have to understand what Canada spent more than a century building in the opposite direction.
The Indian residential school system — which operated for over 130 years, with the last federally funded school closing in 1997 — was not an accident of history or a misguided experiment. It was a policy, articulated plainly by its architects, of cultural elimination. 'Kill the Indian in the child' was not a metaphor. It was a program. Children were taken from their families, forbidden to speak their languages, stripped of their names, and in documented cases subjected to abuse, neglect, and death.5 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified 94 Calls to Action in 2015. As of 2025, the federal government reports that more than 85 percent of those Calls involving the federal government are completed or well underway — progress that is real, partial, and overdue.6
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry, concluded in 2019, found that the violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada constitutes a genocide — a finding the federal government accepted.7 Crisis lines responding to residential school and MMIWG trauma received 56,830 calls in 2024-25 alone. These are not historical footnotes. They are the present-tense consequences of what was done.
Indigenous peoples represent approximately five percent of Canada's population — roughly 1.8 million people. They are the fastest-growing demographic in the country.8 The Indigenomics Institute has projected that an equitable Indigenous economic contribution to Canada's GDP would represent $100 billion annually.9 A 2024 National Aboriginal Economic Development Board report found that fuller Indigenous economic participation would grow Canada's economy by $27.7 billion.10 These are not charitable projections. They are the returns on an investment Canada has not yet made.
The Representation Gap
In the 2025 federal election, 12 Indigenous candidates were elected to the House of Commons. That is progress — and it is still a fraction of proportional representation for five percent of the population in a 343-seat House. Ellis Ross, a former Haisla Nation chief, won Skeena-Bulkley Valley for the Conservatives — a riding the NDP had held since 2004. Buckley Belanger, a Métis candidate, became the sole Liberal MP elected in Saskatchewan.11 In Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Indigenous persons form a majority of members in their respective legislatures.
These are individual achievements of real significance. They are not yet a pattern. Canada has produced its first First Nations premier. It has not yet produced a First Nations or Métis or Inuit prime minister. It has not yet built the pipeline of Indigenous leadership in business, law, medicine, academia, and public service that would make Wab Kinew unremarkable rather than historic. The fact that his election was historic is itself the measure of how far Canada still has to travel.
What Kinew's Approval Rating Is Actually Saying
Kinew has governed Manitoba with consistent approval that polling consistently places at the top of all Canadian premiers. This is worth examining not as a curiosity but as data.
Manitoba is not an easy province to govern. It has significant urban-rural divides, serious public safety challenges in Winnipeg, a complex relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, resource pressures, and fiscal constraints that predate Kinew's government. He has governed across those divides, delivered on campaign commitments, maintained fiscal discipline that he projects will produce the strongest deficit position in the country,12 and built interprovincial relationships in the context of the US trade war. He has done this as a First Nations premier in a country where First Nations leaders have historically been invited to the table only to discuss Indigenous issues — never to set the agenda for everyone.
What Manitobans are saying with their approval is not that they have given Kinew a chance despite his background. They are saying he has earned it — that the quality of governance is the measure, not the identity of the governor. That is the thing Canada claims to believe. Kinew's numbers are proof that it can be true.
The Argument for Urgency
Canada faces, at this moment, a set of challenges that require every talent it has. A trade war that is reshaping its export economy. A military that is rebuilding from decades of underinvestment. A housing crisis that is hollowing out the next generation's ability to put down roots. A climate transition that will require unprecedented investment in energy infrastructure. A geopolitical realignment that demands Canada establish relationships across the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Global South that it has never had to build before.
Indigenous Canadians have been governing their own nations, negotiating complex relationships with hostile external powers, managing land and resource stewardship, and sustaining communities through conditions that would have broken less resilient peoples — for centuries. The governance knowledge, the relationship-building capacity, the long-term thinking that Indigenous cultures have always required for survival, is precisely what Canada needs at scale right now. This is not a romantic claim about Indigenous spirituality or closeness to the land. It is a practical observation about what effective leadership under pressure looks like — and who has been practicing it longest.
Canada's Indigenous peoples are not a resource to be extracted for the country's benefit — that framing is precisely what got Canada into its current moral position. But Indigenous Canadians who wish to lead should not face a country that makes it harder than it needs to be. The barriers that remain — underfunded schools on reserves, gaps in healthcare and infrastructure, the social weight of intergenerational trauma, the structural biases of institutions that were not built with Indigenous participation in mind — are not the natural order. They are the residue of policy choices. They can be changed by policy choices.
What Welcoming Actually Looks Like
Welcoming more Indigenous leaders to Canada's public stage is not a diversity initiative. It is not a box to be checked on a federal equity form. It is a strategic decision about the kind of country Canada intends to be and the depth of the talent pool it is willing to draw from.
It means fully funding Indigenous schools so that the next Wab Kinew does not have to overcome the education gap before he can overcome everything else. It means ensuring that Indigenous communities have the infrastructure — broadband, clean water, roads, healthcare — that the rest of Canada takes for granted and that remains absent in too many First Nations communities. It means creating the conditions in which an Indigenous person who wants to enter law, medicine, politics, or business can do so without carrying a disproportionate burden of structural disadvantage into every room they enter.
It also means something simpler and harder: It means Canada genuinely believing in its institutions and in its public culture that an Indigenous person leading is not an experiment or an act of goodwill — it is the country working properly. Kinew's approval numbers suggest Manitobans have arrived at that belief. The rest of Canada is getting there. The question is how long the country is willing to let the gap between belief and structure persist.
The Reason You Walk
Wab Kinew titled his memoir after a phrase his father told him: You do not walk for yourself alone. You walk for those who came before you and those who will come after. It is a philosophy of obligation — the understanding that individual success is not a private achievement but a passage that widens the road for everyone behind you.
Tobasonakwut Kinew was taken from his family as a child and put into a system designed to unmake him. He survived it. He raised a son who became premier. That is two generations, and in two generations — despite everything Canada did in the first half of the twentieth century to prevent exactly this — an Anishinaabe family produced leadership that the entire country has recognized as exceptional.
Canada did not give them that. They built it themselves, out of what was left after Canada was done.
The question this country now faces is straightforward: If that is what Indigenous Canadians produced while Canada was working against them, what becomes possible when Canada decides — genuinely, structurally, urgently — to work with them instead?
Wab Kinew is not the answer to that question. He is the opening of it. The leaders who come after him — the ones who will not have to be the first — are the answer. Canada's job is to make sure they are not the last.